Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo One, a fully autonomous ride-hailing service, and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over one million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving tens of millions of miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 13+ U.S. states.

The mission of the Waymo Applied Research team is to develop machine learning solutions addressing open problems in autonomous driving, towards the goal of the safely operating Waymo vehicles in dozens of cities and under all driving conditions. As part of our work, we also initiate and foster collaborations with other research teams in Alphabet.

In this hybrid role, you will report to a Staff Research Scientist

You will:

• Extend and fine-tuning existing large vision-language models
• Build datasets, training infrastructure, and mixture of training for driving specific tasks (trajectory planning and rationale, spatial reasoning, semantic understanding)
• Use language to model the driving rationale and environment context
• Research evaluation of a driving system

You have:

• In-depth knowledge of designing and training large language models and multi-modal applications
• 3+ years of experience training generative models networks at scale
• 3+ years of experience in large-scale distributed training and optimization
• Background in publications in top-tier conferences in the related fields
• PhD or equivalent years of experience

We prefer:

• Experience in autonomous vehicles or motion planning
• Experience transferring research findings into products
• Proficiency in C++

The expected base salary range for this full-time position across US locations is listed below. Actual starting pay will be based on job-related factors, including exact work location, experience, relevant training and education, and skill level. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the role location or, if the role can be performed remote, the specific salary range for your preferred location, during the hiring process. 

Waymo employees are also eligible to participate in Waymo’s discretionary annual bonus program, equity incentive plan, and generous Company benefits program, subject to eligibility requirements. 

Salary Range$192,000—$243,000 USD